§ 1. L'importance de la formulation négative, qui définit puissamment le Sanskrit à toutes les étapes de son évolution, apparat avec clarté dès les mantra védiques. Un nombre considérable de formules ne nous sont données que sous l'aspect négatif, soit dans l'ordre de la constatation, soit dans celui de la prohibition. Certains verbes ne figurent guère qu'en proposition négative, ainsi nas- riṣ- rudh- vyath- sridh-. Il se produit très fréquemment qu'une formulation faite d'abord en termes positifs soit reprise' par voie négative (ou l'inverse, mais bien plus rarement), sous une teneur identique ou analogue: ainsi ṇo párā dāḥ, viii, 71, 7 (les références numériques sans nom d'ouvrage concernent le Rgveda), ou avec contre-partie plus stricte dviṣántam máhyaṃ randháyan mó aháṃ dviṣaté radham, i, 50, 13, párā suva/ yád bhadráṃ tán na suva, v, 82, 5. Des séries de strophes sont bâties sur le schème de la “contre-partie” on trouvera des exemples groupés à des fins particulières, pour le RV., par Oldenberg, ZDMG., lx (notamment, p. 727 sqq.); pour la TS., par Weber, Ind. Stud., xiii, p. 77 sqq. (passim); pour l'AV., par M. Gonda, Stilistische Studie over AV. i–vii, p. 33.

The Jain recension of the Siṃhāsanadvātriṃśikā contains two Apabhraṃśa, or as we shall see rather Old Gujarati, stanzas which, as far as I can judge, have not been satisfactorily dealt with by either Weber or Edgerton.

The following loan-words are taken from two newspapers, the Kheḍā vartamān of 5th December, 1928, and the Gujarat Times of 1st January, 1929.

The editors are both Hindus and the readers were for the most part Hindu also. The newspapers contain only a few words in English characters, perhaps eight or nine in each number. The proportion of English loan-words to the total may be about 2 per cent, but this is inevitably only a rough estimate.

The words have been transliterated faithfully with two exceptions—

(1) Inherent a of final consonants is omitted.

(2) Inherent a (not final) is omitted, if not pronounced. In such cases it is indicated by a dot. In Gujarati, however, there are certain consonants which do not alter their form when conjunct, such as “ ka ”. For practical purposes, this is of little importance, as conjunct consonants are often not used, when permissible.

In preparing the list some very uncommon words and transitory political expressions like “Sāyaman gobek” have been omitted. There are one or two words included, which are not English, e.g. peseṭā and Mādrīd, which have been included for their interest. Peseṭā has probably been taken for the English version of the Spanish word, as the t is retroflex. It is not clear, however, why the dental d is used for Mādrīd.

The articles in which few, if any, loan-words occur, are the political leading articles, a notice of a meeting of Brahmans, and a serial story about old Rajputana.

In the course of his work on the new Burmese-English Dictionary the writer of this article had access to certain manuscripts compiled by various members of the Northern Burma Mission who were stationed at Ava and other places in Upper Burma during the early nineteenth century. The manuscripts contain a collection of Burmese proverbs, which were rendered into French by an unknown missionary. The writer sought the assistance of Mrs. A. M. Blandford, 37 Havers Lane, Bishop's Stortford, in deciphering and translating the French equivalents or translations into English; and reference has been made to these in preparing the translation—which is as literal as possible—and the notes as to application, etc., here given. Many of the proverbs are unfamiliar in modern times, and the writer's views as to their application are put forward as suggestions only. No attempt has been made to reproduce in the translations the rhymes of the Burmese. The proverbs were compared with (1) those given in Sagabon Hnittaung, which was compiled by U Taing of the Hanthawaddy Press, Rangoon (3rd impression, 1911), and (2) those given at the end of Stevenson's edition of Judson's Burmese-English Dictionary. The following proverbs (which are arranged in alphabetical order) do not appear in either of these collections and seem not to have been published before.

This list of words and phrases is part of the same volume which contains the Chinese-Malay vocabulary published in Vol. VI, Part 3, of the Bulletin, and is arranged on a similar plan. It has, however, offered greater difficulties than its predecessor owing to the fact that, as compared with Malay, Cham is an unfamiliar language; and though Aymonier and Cabaton's Dictionnaire Čam-Français (published at Paris by Ernest Leroux in 1906) is a first-class piece of work, it does not seem to solve all the problems involved in this vocabulary.

The Cham language is spoken by a dwindling population in Southern Annam and a larger group in French Cochin-China, Camboja, and Siam. The latter group is now completely Muslim, the former contains a minority of Muslims and about twice as many adherents of a species of Hinduism. Sanskrit and Arabic loan-words are therefore fairly numerous in the dictionary, though few will be found in this vocabulary. Apart from such obviously foreign elements, the Cham language is a curious blend of Indonesian and Mon-Khmer; and scholars still differ as to which of these two is the fundamental and original factor. The difficulty is increased by the circumstance that the morphology of these two families of speech is very similar, both using prefixes and infixes which in some cases are practically identical. This, however, is not a matter that need be discussed here.

It is well known what an extraordinary power of absorbing foreign words Persian possesses. In addition to the innumerable Arabic words which since the creation of the New Persian literary language have formed an integral part of Persian speech, we have a fair number of Aramaic words 1 on the one hand, and of Eastern Iranian words on the other; in later times, there is also considerable borrowing from Turkish. It is, I think, proper to regard Eastern Iranian words in Persian as “loan-words” in the same way as, say, Arabic or Aramaic words; for no Eastern Iranian language is amongst the constituent dialects of Modern Persian, which can perhaps best be defined as the descendant of the current language of culture and commerce which developed in Persia during the Sasanian era. So far, little attention has been paid to the Eastern Iranian words in Persian. Horn, in his excellent paper on the New Persian literary language, quoted examples such as Balaχšān, Hilmand, fiš “mane”, fay, fuy “idol”, malaχ “locust”, bilist “span”, lōγḻdan “to milk”, etc., words whose phonetic habitus does not agree with the normal Persian development. To-day we are in a much more fortunate position since the Sogdian language has gradually become known to us: seen from Persia, Sogdian was by far the most important Eastern Iranian language, a language of culture, literature, and commerce, whose territory bordered on the area of Persian speech and extended towards the frontiers of China.

In the first part of this article we have discussed seven different -*- eras or (to be strictly correct) different kinds of time-reckoning with or without a common era. We are now going to deal with the fourteen remaining sections of our list. But before proceeding to the discussion of the next number, I want to insert here a small note relating to No. 3, i.e. the Kharājī era in Egypt, as a complement to what has already been said in the preceding number of this Bulletin (BSOS., pp. 914–15).

Professor A. S. Tritton called my attention to a few Kharājī dates occurring in an Arabic manuscript in the British Museum (Or. 1338). On examining these dates, which belong to the fifth and early sixth centuries A.H., I find some interesting points which supplement our knowledge about that era as used in that country in the time of the Fāṭimid caliphs. This anonymous book is a history of the Monophysite patriarchs of Alexandria, from St. Mark to Matthew the 87th patriarch who died 31st December, 1408, and it must have been composed by an unknown author soon after the latter date.Some of the Kh. dates in this book are given with their corresponding dates of the Diocletian era (era of the Martyrs). These are as follows:—

Moreover, the date of the death of the Fāṭimid Caliph al-Musta‘lī, which happened in the month of Ṣafar, A.H. 495 (Hilālī) = December, A.D. 1101, is given as 491 Kh. (fol. 284b).

Literature is full of the saints of Islam, like the man who was so oppressed by the seriousness of life that he always looked as if he were coming from the funeral of a near relative, and another who fainted when he saw a bedouin smearing his camel with hot tar, because it reminded him of hell. It is a mistake to think that all Muslims lived up to this standard.

Even the pious ‘Umar lost his temper at a formula consecrated by religion. In reply to a question a man said, “God knows best”; the caliph told him to say either “I know” or “I do not know”.Tales told of society in Medina show that amusements tolerated there fell far short of the standard of decency demanded by religion.

There was a class of men who told edifying stories to instruct the faithful. One of them said that those, who fasted for three successive months, would have in heaven houses one thousand parasangs long, broad and high, with doors ten parasangs square. “A poor house for January,” ejaculated one of the audience. Another of these preachers said, “The name of the wolf that ate Joseph was so and so.” It was objected that no wolf ate Joseph so he corrected himself, “The name of the wolf that did not eat Joseph was so and so.”.

The well-known Turkish scholar Kilisli Raf'at, to whom we owe the publication of Kāshgharī's monumental Dīwān lughat al-Turk, was fortunate in discovering a short but important work in Persian, which throws an unexpected light on the military and civil organization of the Aq-qoyunlu state in the reign of Uzun Hasan (A.D. 1466–1478). The original of the ‘Arḍ-nāma (“Account of the Parade”) forms one of the twenty-one items of MS. 1438 of the Ḥamdīya Library in Stambul which contains the complete works (kulliyāt) of Jalāl al-dīn Muḥammad b. As'ad Davānī (A.H. 830–908/ A.D. 1427–1502). This learned theologian, poet, and moralist is particularly known in the west by his Akhlāq-i Jalālī compiled at the request of Sulṭān-Khalīl, who was governor of Fars on behalf of his father Uzun-Ḥasan. The ‘Arḍ-nāma is a further proof of

In the year 5282 (A.D. 1521–2) an Italian Jew made a pilgrimage to Palestine, of which he left a brief record in Hebrew. Until the present year, no manuscript of this work was known,, and even the author's name had not come down to us. The text was preserved in an old Italian collection of Palestine Itineraries, published in Leghorn in 1785, under the name of Shibhḥē Yěrūshālāyim, by one Jacob Bārūkh b. Mōshe Ḥayyim, and several times reprinted since.The editor informs us that he found the work in an old manuscript, and that though the author's name was not marked, he was obviously a man of great learning. Nothing beyond this was known of the anonymous traveller. It had been suggested, without much evidence, that the traveller's name was Bārūkh, and that he was the Rabbi Bārūkh with whom the theologian R. Tam b.Yaḥya corresponded. The latest reprint of this text is that of Mr. J. Eisenstein, in his Corpus of Jewish Travellers.

In the present year a new edition of this work has been published by Mr. Isaac Ben-Zevi, who has had the good fortune to find an early—probably an autograph—manuscript.

Mr. Ben-Zevi's text is in every way fuller and better than the Leghorn edition, and is presumably the original and correct one.Although the manuscript does not bear the author's name, there is no reason to doubt Mr. Ben-Zevi's attribution of the work to Rabbi.

The acceptance by the early women converts of Islam and of Muḥammad as the Apostle of the new monotheistic religion is expressed usually by a stereotyped phrase, which takes the form of “so-and-so became resigned to God and made a bond with the Apostle of God”. At a later date a convert was merely required to repeat the shahādah, but Wensinck has shown that probably this creed was only evolved after Muḥammad's death. In the very early days the mere fact that a woman attended the prayer meetings held by Muḥammad was no doubt sufficient for her to be considered as a member of his community. This being so, what then was the significance of the bond made between the women converts and Muḥammad ? It was possibly made in order to give a more formal aspect to their conversion and to make solemn confession of their belief in one God and their allegiance to Muḥammad as his Apostle, as also to include their acceptance of his ordinances.

I Possess a Persian manuscript, possibly unique, on calligraphers and painters of Iran. It consists of eighty-four folios with twelve lines to a page. The manuscript is unfortunately incomplete : the introduction is missing, as well as a leaf or leaves at the end. Moreover, each of the eight miniatures which it contains has had a section cut out. The script on the reverse of these miniatures is therefore mutilated.

Writing about life in Mecca in 1884–5 Professor C. Snouck Hurgronje made this observation: ”A class of Jâwah who dwell outside the geographical boundaries but who in late years have made regular pilgrimages to Mekka are people from the Cape of Good Hope. They are derived from Malays, formerly brought to the Cape by the Dutch, with a small mixture of Dutch blood. Some words of their Malay speech have passed into the strange, clipped Dutch dialect of the Boers. On the other hand they have exchanged their mother tongue for Cape Dutch, of course retaining many Malay expressions. Taking into consideration the genuinely Dutch names of many of these Ahl Kâf (as they are called in Mekka) one is tempted to believe that degenerated Dutch have been drawn by them into their religion, and many types among them increase the probability of this suggestion. Separated from intercourse with other Moslims they would scarcely have had the moral strength to hold their religion had not eager co-religionists come to them from abroad. When and whence these came is not known to me; however this may be, the mosques in Cape Colony have been more fervently supported in the last twenty years than ever before, more trouble is taken in teaching religion and every year some of the Ahl Kâf fare on pilgrimage to the Holy City.“

During my stay in the British Protectorate of Sierra Leone in the year 1935 I had the opportunity of studying the Mende language, one of the most important languages spoken in this part of West Africa. Through the kind intermediary of the British authorities and by the friendly help of some missionaries, I was able to get knowledge of the different dialects of the Mende language, and to collect a considerable number of stories, fables, and tales.

The following two texts are specimens of the innumerable Mende stories dealing with the “Bush Demon”, a fabulous creature, who is supposed by the natives to be very powerful, and very often to behave extremely inimically towards mankind.